Passed out nearly 500 business cards and 500 flyers and could find a single client other than a friend

[eggimo]

@colin44 IMO the key to success on NextDoor is getting people to post about your service and recommend you. If you can get a handful of positive mentions in the main news feed, then when people search for snow removal recs, they’ll see your biz recommended by several of their neighbors. Ask your happiest customers to make a post on ND. The more you collect, the more credibility you gain on there. Making posts yourself is a lot less effective than having the customers do it.

 

[forwhatitsworth]

@colin44 I own a petcare company and next door is where 90% of my first few months of clients came from. Now it's ND, FB, Google, Yelp (hardly), Instagram has gotten me a few clients, and word of mouth is my bread and butter.

 

[colin44]

@forwhatitsworth And do you have to do paid ads to have success with it? Are the ads there cheaper than FB/Google?

 

[forwhatitsworth]

@colin44 I have yet to spend a dime on paid ads. It's all about building yourself in different groups for different communities in your city. On average I am making $300 -$900/ day and work 4 to 9 hour days with a day off every few weeks.

I won a few awards in ND which also pushed me to the top of their search for pet services and home services.

I post every day on my FB, ND, and IG business pages and every few days I post in different community groups. small business owners, new to jacksonville, dog lovers of jacksonville, silly pets of North Florida, Historic Springfield Community group, Riverside Community and Businesses, etc. There's SO many groups. between FB and ND, I have a good 50k+ people I am directly marketing to and my city has a 50+% pet ownership rate. The best part of using the groups is that people are more likely to see your posts. Just don't spam or oversaturate and follow the group rules for business ad posts. If I see that groups recent posts are a few people then my last post, I skip posting to that group.

I also never direct people to my website. when people request information I ask for their email. This has helped me track leads and reach back out which in turn increases the chance I land them as a client. I also got a robust email list for my email campaigns and monthly newsletters.

 

[colin44]

@forwhatitsworth Congrats on that success! You've made some wise marketing decisions to get there. I didn't realize does ND have a bunch of smaller community groups like FB? Or were all those groups you listed on FB? All I noticed on ND was my general area's feed but I could easily be missing something.

Love the email list campaign idea. I have a good friend who's a website designer and he's always saying that's absolutely key. Appreciate your info!